Throughout the summer of 2022, I examined sentence-final particles in Igala (Niger-Congo; Yoruboid), a minority language spoken in Nigeria. These particles were previously argued to be located in the discourse domain of the sentence (i.e. CP), but as per Erlewine (2015, 2017) in Chinese, we have evidence from Igala that some can also be found lower, in the verbal domain (i.e. vP periphery). For example, the sentence-final particle for negation can be embedded within a nominalized clause, whilst another like g蔚, 鈥榓gain鈥�, cannot. This pointed to the fact that some particles can be located lower in the phrase structure.
To further develop this analysis, my tasks were a combination of (i) reading theoretical linguistic works focusing on the properties of sentence-final particles in various languages, (ii) reading descriptions of similar elements in West African languages which have thus far received little attention in the formal literature, and (iii) working together with native speakers of Igala (via Zoom) to continue to elicit new language data. My supervisor and I met once or twice a week to discuss progress, and so that I could present summaries of readings and elicitation results. Synchronously, I used it as an opportunity to advance my project on negation in Igala, which interacts in interesting ways with sentence-final particles.
After helping another student on their project the preceding year, I wanted to work on a project of my own. This would provide an opportunity to decide if I wanted to pursue research later on in a Masters or PhD. Thus, my learning objectives were to develop this project as a potential writing sample suitable for applications to graduate programs in linguistics. In addition, during this summer project, I wanted to further develop skills in conducting linguistic fieldwork: the refinement of research questions, the development of elicitation materials, and working with speakers to collect data.
A highlight was when I created a python script which automatically converted all the data to LaTeX code. This allowed me to save a great deal of time which was spent on more important things than data cleansing. Another was when, on the last week, we finally got data where sentence-final particles behaved differently from each other. This occurred when we extracted verb phrases containing g蔚 and negation, as stated previously. This moment finally gave us confirmation that we were on the right track. We had found evidence of sentence-final particles located lower in the phrase structure.
However, there were some challenges throughout the project. At first, I thought documenting the data was sufficient so I was taking notes only when I thought something was very important or would be useful later on. However, because of this, we had to go over some data twice. We had many questions that were simple yet not included in the notes. Therefore, it was imperative to take notes about everything and ask pertinent questions so that we didn't have to go through the data multiple times. These notes were also first abbreviated using my own notation, but my advisor suggested making them in plain English. This is because we often forget our own notation after long periods of time and they are usually not intelligible to other team members.
In addition, the collected data was organized by date at first, but I noticed that others had trouble understanding the data if it wasn't presented in a logical fashion. To fix this, I create two documents; one with our data organized linearly by date, and another as if it was being presented to an audience. This greatly helped even myself to better understand the data. Lastly, for the duration of the summer, I had a first year student as a shadow intern. They observed and helped during elicitations, but mostly followed us along to see what research was like. Thus, I had to dive deeper into things to not only understand, but to be able to explain to them.
Overall, this summer was a great experience where I learned a lot about the academic world and how to navigate it. The project has given me confirmation that I would like to pursue graduate school, which I will be applying for this fall. I鈥檇 like to thank my supervisor Martina Martinovic虂 for guiding me along this project, for her never ending support, and for always pushing me towards realizing my full potential. Lastly, I鈥檇 like to extend my sincere gratitude to the award donors, who made it possible for us to contribute to the description of an understudied language.
